New Year’s Eve 2024 – A Times Square Tradition
/How will you celebrate New Year’s Eve?
Roughly a million people will crowd into Times Square for the drop of the iconic Times Square Ball tonight. The tradition was started in 1907 by the New York Times’ owner, Adolph Ochs, when the city banned fireworks. The ball has dropped every year at midnight (00:00) on January 1st since then with the exception of 1942-1943, the years of WWII when ‘lights out’ was enforced.
Did you know that Times Square, at the intersection of 7th Avenue, Broadway and 42nd Street was actually once named Longacre Square? It became Times Square in 1904 when the New York Times moved into its new digs the Times Building at One Times Square.
The First Times Square Ball Drop in 1907
According to the Times Square Ball website (yup, it has a website!), the first ball drop in 1907 was a 700-pound ball made of iron and wood, illuminated with 100 25-watt light bulbs and was manually lowered by a team of six men about 70’ from the top of a flagpole on top of the Times Building. Since then there have been seven versions of the Ball.
From Ball Drop.com I learned, “The original Ball was replaced in 1920 with a 5-foot, 400-pound iron Ball. This Ball lasted to 1995, when a third Ball debuted, adding rhinestones and a computerized lighting system featuring strobe lights.”
[To celebrate the millennium, a new ball was fabricated by Waterford Crystal.] “Weighing 1,070 pounds and measuring 6 feet in diameter, the fourth ball was covered with 504 Waterford Crystal triangles illuminated with 168 halogen bulbs outside. Internally, 432 bulbs of clear, red, blue, green and yellow colors along with strobe lights and spinning mirrors lit up the night.” In 2006, LEDs replaced incandescent lights.
The Waterford Crystal designed Millennium Ball
In honor of the Ball Drop's 100th anniversary, a fifth design debuted for New Year's Eve 2007/2008. Waterford Crystal again designed a crystal ball weighing 1,212 pounds totally illuminated by LEDs and incorporating computerized lighting patterns capable of producing over 16.7 million colors., The 2008 Ball was only used once and has been on display inside the Times Square visitor center ever since.
100th Anniversary Ball in 2007 Photo Credit: Timothy A. Clary
According to Wiki, “A sixth new Ball debuted on New Year's Eve 2009 and is still in use.A larger version of the previous ball, the current ball is an icosahedral geodesic sphere with a diameter of 12 feet (3.7 m), and weight of 11,875 pounds (5,386 kg). It contains 2,688 panels, and is lit by 32,256 LED lamps. The new ball was designed to be weatherproof and is displayed atop One Times Square nearly year-round following the New Year’s Eve celebrations.”
Current times Square Ball to be retired after 2024/2025 New Years Celebration Photo: Julie Walker
“For 2025, it was announced that this ball will be dropped for the final time. After the final ball drop to ring in 2025, the ball will be preserved as a year-round public exhibition at the Times Travel Museum at One Times Square. Michael Phillips, president of Jamestown, the company [currently] having ownership of One Times Square, announced a new ball after 2025, which will be ‘a completely different design, but also is dynamic, but more digitally interactive.’
A little trivia...
*The ball doesn’t actually ‘drop’ in the sense of a freefall, but rather it descends down a specially designed flagpole, beginning at 11:59:00 p.m. ET, and slides down the pole arriving precisely at midnight to signal the start of the new year.
*The trip from the top of the pole to the bottom takes only a minute, but the drop is actually 77 ft meaning that ~6 tons of metal, crystal and lights drop over a foot per second and manage to stop without crushing everything underneath it. Wow!
*For the first 87 years of the ball drop, the spectacle was entirely manual. It is now an electronic process and an atomic clock in Colorado controls the countdown.
*3,000 pounds of confetti grace the heads of spectators when the clock strikes midnight. It takes more than 100 people and 30,000,000 individual pieces of paper to make the spectacle happen.
*According to research done by WalletHub, 360 million glasses of champagne or sparkling wine are consumed on New Year's Eve each year.
Us? We’ll pop a bottle of champagne and hope to make it to midnight for a New Year’s kiss. The chances are slim we’ll make it, but maybe if we take a nap?